Junk Food: The American Way
Essay for Wire, 6/7/92
For five years, I’ve been writing a newsletter called Misc. It usually contains a segment commenting about the “Junk Food of the Month.”
I believe junk food is an important part of Americana; an important part of any culture. Archaeologists on their digs like to show off rare treasures and ceremonial objects, but they get the most productive research out of examining the remaining objects of a culture’s everyday life. What it wore, what it used as tools, and how it ate.
Our understanding of England would be just a bunch of cluttered stereotypes if we knew only about its fine cuisine (come to think of it, is there any fine cuisine in England)? You can tell much more about how England really lives by taking a quick glance at lukewarm thick ale, cucumber sandwiches, fish and chips that used to be sold wrapped in newspaper, and the near-unspeakable things they make out of the variety meats.
That’s why I write about junk food, because it’s the true symbol of one’s country. It embodies the American obsessions with advertising flair, instant gratification, and obsessive-compulsive “fun.” There’s more real America in a box of Teddy Grahams than in a thousand white-college-boy blues bands.
The history of junk food is the history of America, from the first Uneeda Biscuit ads in turn-of-the-century magazines to the building of the first companies capable of supplying fresh food products through a network of plants connected to every spot on the continent.
Junk food is also a microcosm of modern advances in technology. Several years ago, there was this great British documentary shown on the PBS series Nova, about the making of a new snack product. It began with surveys showing that consumers wanted more wholesome, natural snacks — but then these guys with college degrees in food tech reduced those desires to a set of flavors and textures, to be re-created with the newest manufacturing advances. The end result was a tubular cracker with a cheese-flavored filling, “co-extruded” through an experimental continuous-run machine. Even that wasn’t half as cool as the scene with the stuffy Brit executives trying to figure out how “natural” they could legally call their product while still getting to use their complete arsenal of additives and processes.
Junk food is not always pretty, but neither is this country, as we have seen in recent weeks. But it can be a source of understanding. For one recent example: Prior to the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there are Hostess Turtles Pies (advertised as “Fresh from the sewers to you!”) and Farley’s Turtle Eggs. Since there are no female mutant turtles, I don’t know where the eggs come from; the pies have “vanilla puddin’ power” within the famous Hostess crust and a thorough layer of green frosting. I have publicly nauseated people by eating one in their presence. Kids, of course, get off on doing things considered gross by people my age. As for the fantasy of foods arriving fresh from the sewer, it’s a natural for a target audience of guys living in the years between toilet training and puberty, some of whom have a healthy obsession with exploring the sides of human/animal nature that us grownups keep trying to ignore.
The “vanilla” flavor in the pies probably came from a 42-year-old south Seattle plant that made over three million pounds of vanillin a year. According to the Times, the chemical flavoring was extracted from sulfite-waste liquor from wood pulp, processed with sodium hydroxide. One pound of vanillin was taken from 140 pounds of pulp, used for important drugs as well as flavoring; the remaining pulp was sent on to paper mills. Now, the plant’s closing, replaced by a Sunbelt plant that will make a synthetic substitute — an imitation imitation. (I want to hear no grumblings from the natural-food crowd about how unappetizing this all sounds. Vanillin is chemically identical (“nature-identical” in British lingo) to traditional vanilla; it just comes from a tree instead of a bean. Besides, some of these same purists will drench their pancakes with concentrated tree sap.)
Disappearance is an accepted fact of life when one is a junk food aficionado. So many of the junk foods I’ve written about in the past five years are no longer available. You can’t, to the best of my knowledge, get Space Food Sticks, or Pudding Roll-Ups. I know you can’t get Billy Beer, and that it’s even become hard to find the generic “Beer Beer” with the puzzles inside the bottle cap letting you test whether you’ve had too many that you can’t see or think straight. And you can’t even get Vernell’s Gummy Transformers anymore, those chewy candies in the shapes of powerful robots.
But wherever there is disappearance, there is scarcity, and the chance to profit from people’s memories. Somebody is trying to start a craze for collecting cereal boxes, reportedly primarily to raise prices for his own collection, and is starting a magazine called Flakes to promote the new hobby. Look for it. Also look for a three-volume video collection of cereal commercials.
You can tell where a nation’s heart is any given year by the ways in which it consumes its sugar and/or alcohol. Envir-O-Mints are not going to save the world all by themselves, but the yummy locally-made little chocolate pieces with pictures of endangered species embossed onto them do show off the consumer’s concerns for a better future. Sure, you could say that these animals would stand a better chance of survival if more of the Third World wasn’t cleared off to grow cocoa, coffee and sugar for western consumption, but a few cases of mints aren’t going to change that imbalance in either direction.
Or take a recent Kraft newspaper insert, headlined “A President’s Day Offer: Free Broccoli when you buy Cheez Whiz.” The ad shows a tiny, grinning G. Washington in a green suit, pouring pasteurized process cheese spread atop an oversize plate of the famous vegetable. Not only is the ad a wonderfully garish display of almost glow-in-the-dark colors, but it ties a gooey processed dairy product in with the public image of a president who, at the time the ad was designed, didn’t have much of a public image to exploit.
Junk foods are also an underrated force in local and national politics. Note the attempts to ban McDonald’s in a few towns across the country that think they’re “progressive” but are really just paternalistic. And note how the soft drink bottling industry always comes to Olympia when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), and now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products.
And if you still don’t think snack foods are an integral part of the modern human condition, think of this: A chain of burger kiosks has gone up in the streets of Cuba, where meat has not been in significant supply for several years. The official newspaper Granma insists that the burgers are “highly nutritious” and contain “a minimum of 60 percent pork.” The notion that Castro would divert precious meat supplies for a snack product shows how vital snack products are to people’s souls. To buy something to eat which has been prepared by someone else is in its own little way a mark of luxury. It proclaims that one has risen, at least slightly, above the standards of one’s ancestors who toiled all day, every day, to gather and prepare a meal.
